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“You’re in for the Ride of Your Life”
On United Flight 811, an extraordinary message saved Shari Peterson in more ways than one.
On February 23, 1989, Shari Peterson was among the last to board United Flight 811 from Honolulu to Sydney. It was nearly 1:00 AM when she walked the gangway to the aging Boeing 747 for the final leg of a journey begun many hours earlier in Denver. Only five thousand miles to go, she thought wearily.
There was at least one thing to be thankful for, one perk of being a travel agent and tour guide: Her new last-minute seat assignment was an upgrade to business class.
Inside, she handed the flight attendant her boarding pass—“9F” was handwritten at the top—and the woman pointed the way to her seat. Just a few more steps to a good night’s sleep. The pills in her bag would guarantee it.
But 9F was already occupied.
“I showed the man sitting there my boarding pass, to try and figure out which of us was in the wrong place,” she recalled. “But he made it absolutely clear he had no intention of moving. The flight attendant could see what was happening and told me to sit anywhere, because it was past time for departure.”
Seat 13F was empty. Shari took it and settled in as the plane taxied to the runway. She closed her eyes and sighed heavily, looking forward to the oblivion of sleep. The truth was there was more on her mind than the stress of a long travel day or the demanding schedule awaiting her in Australia, where she was expected to “babysit” three hundred business executives at a convention. Her personal life was a mess, and the reason was no mystery: She was married to a psychologically and emotionally abusive man, who took every opportunity to tell her she was a worthless embarrassment. The relationship grew more intolerable by the day, but she could not see a way out.
“To be honest, I didn’t think I deserved to get away from him,” she said. “I secretly believed he was right about me. So I started using pills and booze like candy to make it all go away, even if just for a while.”
She fastened her seat belt and reached for the sleeping pills to follow her overnight-flight ritual. However, as she shook the tablets into her palm, an insistent thought crossed her mind:
Don’t do that. You might need your wits about you in case of emergency.
Shari stopped. It wasn’t the sort of thing she ever told herself.
What emergency? she thought. Flying is perfectly safe these days. The aircraft are carefully maintained, and the crews are well trained. There’s no reason to lose sleep worrying about something that’ll probably never happen.
Even so, uncharacteristically, she put the pills away.
“People with substance-abuse problems are ‘para-suicidal’,” she noted. “It’s a fancy way of saying we’re trying to kill ourselves, just very discreetly. So I should have been thinking, I don’t care if we crash and I’m drugged. Bring it on. But for some reason I chose to follow that nudging to stay alert.”
The captain announced clearance for takeoff and advised that passengers should expect the Fasten Seat Belt sign to stay on a bit longer than usual while he navigated around an offshore thunderstorm during ascent. Otherwise, he predicted, they should enjoy a smooth, uneventful flight.
Shortly after departure, Shari still felt agitated by her encounter with the man in 9F. She decided to take her mind off that, and everything else, by reading herself to sleep. She reclined her seat, loosened the belt, and had just opened her book when someone spoke directly in her ear, as if leaning down behind her right shoulder.
“Tighten your seat belt,” said a young man’s voice, calm but firm. “You’re in for the ride of your life.”
“I had the impression the voice belonged to a young male flight attendant,” she said. “But I knew very well that was not the sort of thing they would say. When I put my book down and turned to ask him what the heck he was talking about, no one was there.
“I looked into the galley behind my seat. The only person I saw was the female attendant who’d told me to sit wherever I could. The hairs on my neck stood up. I knew something way out of the ordinary had just happened and that I should listen.”
She straightened her chair, tightened the belt, and tucked her thumbs under the strap. Her heart pounding, she glanced across the aisle on her right and saw the moon, big and beautiful, framed in the window. The plane climbed smoothly. “The ride of her life” seemed unlikely. She’d wait and see.
She didn’t have to wait long.
No more than a minute later, an explosion rocked the aircraft.
“I heard a loud sound, a kind of grind and bump, and then—POW!—the whole side of the plane ahead of me on my right just disappeared, in the blink of an eye. I closed my eyes and thought, This can’t be happening! When I opened them again I could see the engines on fire outside.”
A fierce wind slammed into Shari like an arctic gale, whipping her hair and stinging her eyes. Darkness filled the cabin as the lights went out, but she could see flying debris as dislodged ceiling tiles, carry-on luggage, books, cups, and more were sucked through the twenty-foot-wide hole in the fuselage. Exposed wires sparked overhead. Even over the thunderous roar of wind and engines, which were only a few feet away, Shari heard shrieks of terror all around.
“I looked down through where part of the floor used to be and saw moonlit clouds miles below. A beautiful sight, but immediately I thought, This isn’t going to end well.”
Investigators later learned that the latch on the forward cargo door had failed, leading to rapid, uncontrolled decompression and to the structural failure of the fuselage. Along each side of the cabin were two seats in each row, one on the aisle and one by the window. The eight people seated there in rows 9 through 12 were hurtled out of the aircraft in an instant. Only one passenger across the aisle, in the plane’s middle section, also was ejected. He had been seated in 9F.
Shari looked left and saw a man and a woman with their young daughter, their clothes whipping in the wind. They were terrified, clinging to one another, but unharmed.
To her right, across the aisle in row 13, a couple was bloodied from flying debris but still there and buckled in. However, their seats canted forward at an alarming angle, and the floor was gone beneath their feet. Seeing their panicked faces, Shari grabbed the man’s arm to steady him against falling farther forward.
Behind him, she was horrified to see the flight attendant who’d been in the galley when the explosion happened—she was conscious, but her body was contorted, wedged into a tiny space beneath the tipping seats. If they came loose, nothing would stop her from falling out into the night.
“I reached out and held her arm, just to let her know she wasn’t alone,” Shari remembered. “And I started praying, desperately crying out for help. Then in my mind I saw a giant hand swoop down out of the sky under the plane, and I knew we were going to be okay.
“My mind was screaming that this was impossible. I’d flown enough to know we had little chance of a safe landing. But I held to that image.”
In the cockpit, Captain David Cronin had thrown out the book on how to respond . . . because there was no book for this crisis. His instincts took over, the fruit of many years’ experience as a military fighter pilot and glider pilot. He immediately compensated manually for the lost starboard engines. He began dumping fuel to minimize the risk of fire should they manage to return to Oahu for an emergency landing.
Unable to contact the flight attendants, he sent his engineer below to assess the situation. The man soon returned, visibly shaken by the extent of the damage. Given the plane’s weakened structure, the crew decided to maintain airspeed of 250 knots, barely above the 240-knot stall speed.
Cronin managed to turn the plane around and set a course for the airport. He held the craft higher than the gradual glide normally used on approach, knowing he’d never regain any lost altitude. He’d have to drop swiftly, as if landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Shari watched through the floor as they turned around. As she saw the approaching lights of Honolulu, she was amazed the battered 747 hadn’t already broken into pieces. She also was astonished at how calm she was.
“I felt this amazing serenity,” she said. “I was so detached. I thought, Huh, so this is how I’m going to die? It’s amazing what goes through your head when that time comes. Things you’ve done in your life do flash in front of you, along with things you’d like to have done.”
But it wasn’t “that time” yet.
Against all odds, Captain Cronin nursed the plane back, touching down perfectly with an improbable airspeed of less than 200 knots. The landing gear held. The brakes stopped them before runway’s end despite the lost engines.
Just fourteen minutes after the explosion, the crew executed a textbook evacuation of all remaining passengers in less than ninety seconds. In subsequent computer simulations, which sought to account for every conceivable variable, investigators never were able to successfully land a 747 with the damage Flight 811 had suffered.
A soft Hawaiian rain began to fall on the tarmac as the stunned and shaken travelers waited for transport to the terminal. Shari looked at the plane, at the wound in its side that had meant swift tragedy for a few, but that should have been fatal for everyone aboard. She trembled as she considered her likely fate had seat 9F been empty after all. She marveled that she’d chosen to listen to an unfamiliar inner urging.
In her mind she still saw the divine hand lifting them to safety. And she saw herself in a new light—not worthless after all but ready to get her life back on track. That was the first step on her road to freedom and recovery.
Most of all she still heard the voice in her ear: “Tighten your seat belt. You’re in for the ride of your life.”
“I am very humbled when I think about that night,” she said. “I’ve asked myself many times why I was allowed to survive, why it wasn’t me in 9F. I don’t have an answer to that. I grew up in the Methodist Church and was always fascinated with God. But I wondered, why don’t the stories we read about in the Bible ever seem to happen today? It bothered me.
“Now I know: Miracles do happen! They happen today just as they have throughout history, and sometimes just as dramatically as in the Bible stories. I’ve learned to be much more real in my approach to life, relationships, and faith—because you never know when you wake in the morning where you might end up. You’ve got to be fearless and not so concerned with what people think of you. Be a warrior for your own soul and know you are not alone. God intervenes in our lives—I am living proof.”